


All Broken

by Carbocat



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Denial, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, Malcolm Bright Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:54:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21594910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: He was brave and he was stupid, and he was so scared at every second of his life, so it didn’t make any sense to sit on the sidelines when he had to know. There were a hundred billion seconds of a hundred million lifetimes but there was only this second. That second.He would never stand in the same place twice – never be in that office again, holding that phone, listening to the breathy voice on the line that promised answers if he just listened. It took a second. He gave a second.There were a hundred billion seconds and a hundred million lifetimes, and he was going to be broken for all of them unless he did something.
Relationships: Gil Arroyo & Malcolm Bright
Comments: 7
Kudos: 123





	All Broken

“For the record, I am completely-“

“Don’t say it.”

The tension in the room was palpable, taking up a space all its own within the confines of the four walls. It stretched and it leaned forward, it bared it teeth and it _chewed_. It pressed up against the guardrails of the bed and spilled over onto the sheets, making itself unbearably known.

It _ticked_ in the spaces between their words like teeth shaken in a jar, like a time bomb, like the way that a person with too little sleep and too much caffeine ticked in little ways. It pressed a dirty hand to his chest and felt his fast beating heart, and it whispered, _smile anyways._

It hushed, _you’re so lucky, why wouldn’t you be?_

It pressed its dirty hands to the smooth of his chest and curled its overgrown fingernails, sinking them deep into flesh, into muscle and artery. It curled in deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and Malcolm sighed. He rubbed his knuckles over the bruises on his breast bone and slumped down into the bed.

The whole world breathed into his mouth, tension and all, and it was expelled in one sharp exhale, and nothing changed about the room or the world outside the door. Nothing changed about what happened and what didn’t happen, and he felt like screaming.

Nothing would change at all.

Nothing would _ever_ change.

Gil’s eyes were watchful, piercing like a knife into the side of his face where his jaw twitched beneath the skin. His arms were crossed, fists clenched, and Malcolm. He sunk down a little more under the weight of it all and forced another breath out through his dry lips.

He scratched absently at the hospital bracelet on his wrist and then at the scabs eating away at his skin beneath it. He let the rest of his sentence stumble back into his mouth wordlessly and chewed them up with sharp teeth. He ground them into mush and tried to spit them out differently, “Gil, I-“

“No.”

Malcolm’s jaw tightened and he stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth, pressing until it hurt, unto he could suppress the urge to shatter his jaw screaming. He tried to clear his throat of the bubbled emotion there, but it felt too much like gargling glass. He tried pressing his lips together, but they cemented together like mud.

So, he tried again.

“Gil, I was in control of the situation.”

“ _No,_ Bright. You weren’t.”

Malcolm let his eyes slam shut like little shutters in a prison lockdown, like the trunk of a car on the shapeless hapless form of a body not quite dead inside of a duffle bag. He let his head fall back against the thin pillow, and then he wasn’t in the hospital at all. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t awake.

He was a solid and a liquid, a dream and a shell. He was everywhere and nowhere inside of his head, and nothing was real, but nothing was fake. It was an endless cycle of trauma, one after the other, after the other, after the other.

Survivor. Victim. Broken.

It was all the fucking same.

_Broken._

For a second, he wanted to unhinge his jaw screaming.

Everything flooded back and he was standing knee-deep in the moment that irreparably changed his life forever, talking to the cop that he had called using the phone in his father’s office. He was digging his thumbs into his palms, rooted to the floor as he whispered that his dad was going to kill him.

He was standing in the flashing lights with his father in front of him, telling him that it was okay, telling him that he loves him, telling him, _we’re just the same._

Telling him, _we’re the same, we’re the same, we’re the same._

For a second, he was finding the nerve inside of Harvard-accepted skin. He was finding a name, finding a smile that looked real, finding himself stuck inside of that cell with his father, screaming – screaming for anything. He wanted out, _he wanted out, he wanted out._

He was behind the glass, being watched and analyzed. He was called out in class for his neurosis and his deep understanding of a sick mind. He was being watched at a distance by teachers, by the FBI, by _someone._ He was small again and there were big hands over his small ones, guiding a knife into a bag and praising him for it, and – he was in that station wagon again, agreeing not to tell Mom and singing American Pie out of tune at the top of his lungs.

And the second ticked by like his jaw, and the timebomb, and all those teeth in the jar. He was answering a phone in an unused room, agreeing to things that he knew he shouldn’t. He was falling down the rabbit hole, pulling on too many threads – the victim, the survivor, smart, _just like your father._

He was brave and he was stupid, and he was so scared at every second of his life, so it didn’t make any sense to sit on the sidelines when he _had_ to know. There were a hundred billion seconds of a hundred million lifetimes but there was only _this_ second. _That_ second.

He would never stand in the same place twice – never be in that office again, holding that phone, listening to the breathy voice on the line that promised answers if he just listened. It took a second. He gave a second.

There were a hundred billion seconds and a hundred million lifetimes, and he was going to be broken for all of them unless he did something.

So, he did _something_.

And he did it alone.

The FBI had called him reckless.

“Malcolm.”

They were fleeting seconds and a whole lifetime of being broken beneath gentle hands, and he was still beating against the inside of a homemade coffin. He was still wandering lost and delirious in the woods, still hunted for sport, trapped between those wooden slats and rusted nails as the dirt poured in shovel by shovel.

He was in that hole in the ground. He was calling out anything, out everything, but everything was filling up with dirt. He had claws and scratched, and kicked, and _climbed_ his way out. He had spat out mud, had breathed in dirt, had ran. He’d been hunted down, and tied down, and washed clean of his inhibitions.

He was told that he was persistent.

He was told that deep down, he _wanted_ to survive.

That made him different from the other ones.

He was laying in his bed in the hospital again, with the police surveillance outside the door, with Gil’s crossed arms, and there was dirt pouring into the room from the slots in the vents. It was pouring, and pouring, and pouring, pushing tension out of the room with a much more pressing _panic,_ pushing Gil out too.

The dirt rose from the floor in heaps. It dropped out of the ceiling and dirtied the bed, and it drowned him.

And then he took a breath.

He took another one.

He opened his eyes to a clean room, and the second ticked by into another one.

There were four white walls that surrounded him and the loud unmuffled noise of a busy hospital outside of the door, and there was Gil. He was asking where he went, what was wrong, and all Malcolm could really muster up was the same half-believed smile of his mother, “I’m _fine_ , Gil. You worry too much.”

“Truly, I’m fine,” He repeated, trying to smile more. Tying to make it believable. “I’m just tired. Nothing really happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Gil repeated. He nodded his head a little incredulous, a little angry, and then pinched the bridge of his nose so tight that his fingertips went white. “ _Nothing_ happened. You just happened to voluntarily follow a serial killer into an unmapped forest, _alone_ , without telling anybody. _Without_ backup. You’re lucky that we were able to get a ping off a cell tower before your phone was destroyed because otherwise-“

“I mean, I wasn’t hurt. Physically. Nothing that I cannot recover from.”

“You…” Gil trailed off. He took a breath and Malcolm expected him to yell. He had the air of a man that’s wit’s end was hanging like a nose around his neck and getting tighter, and he was going to yell. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Gil took a breath and said slowly, “You were buried in a ditch and left for dead.”

“It was-“

“No, don’t give me that bullshit about how it was a test, Bright. Don’t even _try_ that. You were left for dead and the only reason that you are here right now is because you _crawled_ your way out of an unmarked grave,” He said in a quiet kind of intensity, explaining details that Malcolm already knew like he didn’t truly understand them.

Malcolm knew. He knew it got bad, but he also knew that it was necessary, and surely Gil-

“You have dirt in your lungs,” He labored. “Bright, you have two broken fingers and cracked ribs. You’re in the damn hospital for Christ’s sake.”

“For dehydra-“

“For severe dehydration,” Gil snapped, voice still quiet. “For severe dehydration, heat exhaustion, and exposure. You’re lucky to be alive right now.”

“I needed to know.”

Gil pinched the bridge of his nose, “Bright.”

“He knew my father, Gil,” Malcolm tried. He truly tried to explain it, but he didn’t have the words. Everything sounded desperate and labored just being spoken, “He knew about the girl in the box. I needed – I needed to know why I couldn’t remember what happened after I found her.”

He felt tired, like his tongue was too thick in his mouth. He felt like all the words were there in the back of his throat, but they were jumbled up like Christmas lights and he wouldn’t have them untangled until June. He didn’t know how to explain to Gil that he had to go alone or Paul was never going to help him. He had to endure all the trails and the tribulations to prove that he wanted it, that he would fight until the end for it.

In order to find salvation in an answer, he needed to endure hell.

He had to be _grateful._

He had to work for it.

He had to know what he couldn’t remember, or he was never going to be able to get over it. He couldn’t fix himself when there was a large looming part of him missing. He was never going to be normal, or functional, or be able to breathe deeply, “My dad was never going to tell me, Gil. I had to know about the woman in the box. I _needed_ to know.”

He knew that it came out wrong because Gil had that same look on his face that he did when Malcolm was fifteen and leaving cuts on his body because it was easier to control how he was hurting than control anything else. He had the same look when Malcolm showed up at a crime scene delirious on sleeping pills and insomnia, convinced that he could help.

Gil sighed, “This was your last case with the NYPD, Malcolm.”

“Gil-“

“I’m not going to help you get yourself killed, Malcolm,” He snapped, voice so ridged that it sounded like the infrastructure of it would collapse in on itself. “I’m not going to have your blood on my hands because you want to get yourself killed chasing after something that had nothing to do with you.”

Malcolm tried, “I’m fine.”

He tried, “It wasn’t the best decision, Gil. I realize that now.”

“Do you remember what you were saying when we found you?” He asked. “You were strapped down to that table after you got caught again. I don’t know how long you were out in those woods, or how long you were strapped down, or what he gave you, but you were out of it. Delirious. You were repeating something. Do you remember what it was?”

Malcolm didn’t say anything.

He didn’t need to. They both knew that he didn’t know, like they both knew that if he had enough wits about himself than he wouldn’t have broken down crying that he wanted to stay, that he didn’t remember yet. _Paul promised that he’d remember._ He wouldn’t have tried to fight against the NYPD to get back to a killer that –

“You were saying _‘we’re the same’_ over and over again,” Gil supplied. “He was torturing you, Malcolm. He wasn’t trying to help you remember anything. He was trying to break you.”

Sometimes.

Sometimes everything just felt like the cruelest joke. It felt like the ghost of a nightmare damp on the back of his neck, like fingers forcing his mouth into a smile, and all Malcolm could do was shake his head.

“You can’t break what’s already been broken.”


End file.
